Tag Archives: test

Mar 16 2015
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Advertising, Business, Insight, Marketing Strategy, Strategy

Training Hard Makes You More Human

“We are not encouraging people to just run faster for the sake of being faster. We are saying that ultimately you will be able to enjoy life if you take the time to cater to your own humanity.”
–Matt O´Toole (Reebok President)

Reebok has been a really interesting brand lately.

Their commitment to fitness has been a bold move and also makes perfect sense (as we have to also bear in mind that Reebok is owned by Adidas). Especially there has been tremendous growth in “tough fitness” which includes crossfit, martial arts and other “more demanding than your regular Zumba”-activities. What started out as a niche exercise has become now mainstream and everyone is flipping tires these days: me as well.

During the latest Super Bowl, Reebok launched their new brand belief piece “Be More Human”:

I like it (mainly because I am part of target audience). Also because the message Reebok conveys is part of my whole life philosophy. I don´t eat to live, I don´t train to live. I live to train & eat. Sports is not just a way to prevent your inevitable physical deterioration, it also strengthens you mentally and socially.

Training hard improves you as a person. Competing against others makes you tougher but it is also social. I have learned more from teamwork, leadership and grit from basketball court than from work. When you push it to the limits in sports, you are more likely to be able to push it to the limits with other things as well.

And that belief I heartily endorse.

The other reason why Reebok´s message is compelling is that it is not for all. Reeboks has made a deliberate decision to be exclusive. Their core focus is in tough fitness and quite hardcore training with blood, blisters, sweat, snot, tears and tear down. Whereas the usual scared brand advertiser would have expanded the target audience and showed people doing all the mundane fitness moves and have message about how “fitness is for everyone”, Reebok kept the focus. Reebok is for those who train hard (or think they train hard, like me). The almost brutal nature of their ads is refreshing compared to the touchy-feely lifestyle-routes the majority of sports brands have chosen.

“We’re confident that when we push ourselves, we not only transform our bodies, we transform our entire lives.”
Matt O´Toole

That brings us to the last point. They are expanding, but they are promoting the whole category of tough fitness (which can basically mean quite diverse things) and training hard. Their message resonates naturally to those who currently are sport freaks, but it also has appeal to people who push themselves in other things in life. Showcasing the more “holistic” (in the lack of better word) benefits of intense exercise, they collaborated with scientist David McRaney and created the Human score to calculate your level of humanness:

It is a human nature to be a sucker for tests and I could not wait to test my humanness. I was luckily still more close to human than android. “Brain buff” also sounds like a new upcoming fad term like spornosexual:

brainbuff

As part of the campaign there is also a selfie competition (because no brand is perfect) and some other infographics about how training affects your brain.

Reebok is at least having tight focus on what they are doing. I believe that it will also pay off, if they have the perseverance and patience to follow their daring brand belief through.

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Jan 20 2015
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Advertising, Insight, Marketing Strategy, Planning, Strategy

Rethink Your Marketing Research

Majority of brands are doing research wrong. They spend all their efforts with focus groups, where “target audience” is overanalyzing ad storyboards in conditions that could not be more removed from the reality where those ads really are seen. In addition to focus, there is also qualitative research where the same “target audience” lies to their heart´s content about how they care about sustainability, ethicality but in reality only care about the price.

Don´t get me wrong. Right research is essential to successful marketing. Majority of brands would benefit with constant testing and research in the marketplace. You should be able to change advertising assets based on their actual performance in the media. Yes, it requires a little bit more production budget but will result in better success rate. Although there has been quite a lot talk about optimization, it is still surprising that how few brands and brand managers do the effort to measure, optimize and improve. It is just so much more convenient to blow up the money on useless focus groups.

Research is a powerful tool if we approach it differently. Where boring background research is generally reserved to the beginning of the project and happily forgotten by the time there is the creative development is on its full swing, you could actually make research integral part of your advertising. No need to be too scientific or cerebral about it:

Research is essentially just finding things out.

How you find things out is not limited to traditional methods. With digital tools we have more agile ways to do research and figure things up. Don´t let the bad image of current market research stop you. Be more of a mad scientist, less a census data collector and get your hands dirty with the research. On the right hands research can be a powerful creative tool and not just requisite tick in the box.

Great example about this is Shave Test by Gillette. Gillette could have done the usual boring qualitative study and ask women how they feel about beard. When asking someone for an opinion, you always give her opportunity to lie. Therefore observation is always better than asking. Therefore women might have been tempted to say that they love beards, because all the hipsters around sporting their beardos clouded their judgment. Regardless of the truthfulness of the answer, the guys could not have cared less. It would just have been another boring research piece that brands do all the time and no one really notices.

So instead of opting for boring, Gillette collaborated with Tinder for the rogue research. Right swipe in Tinder has become a unified standard for sex appeal. So Gillette and Tinder tested, which get more right swipes: bearded or well-groomed guys. The results were probably not that surprising to women, maybe a little bit to all bearded hipsters out there. You can watch highlights on the video below or get more detailed results in the campaign website:

How many times have come out with exciting creative from your focus groups?

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Oct 22 2012
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Advertising, Digital Strategy, Planning, Strategy

Everyone Should Be a Producer

We used to live in the age of ideas, but we have already moved to the next phase:

The Age of Experiment.

It used to be about “what”. After the digital revolution we have to stress the importance of “how”. You cannot really separate the actual production from the actual idea. You cannot have real creativity in digital without the understanding and working knowledge of the actual channels. There are million ways to kill a great idea, nearly as many ways to save good one as well.

By the time you spend on polishing that perfect idea, someone else has already done ten imperfect tests. And actually reached the perfection that way. We have to do prototypes, demos and test runs to find the perfect idea. Ideas without the actual experiments are worthless. The difference between companies will be in the agility to come up with actual working executions as fast as possible. Produce something real or die.

There will neither be separation of the “thinkers” and “doers” anymore. If you want to succeed, you have to be both. Strategy will be more and more shaped with the actions and actual outcomes, not with non-productive marathon meetings discussing some incomprehensible PowerPoint presentation. Forget the “high-level” thinking or “low-level” doing. There will be just one level: the working level.

Everyone should be producer.

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